The People's Convoy Keeps Getting Flipped Off By D.C. Drivers
BETHESDA, MARYLAND – MARCH 07: Trucks drive alongside each other as they participate in The Peoples Convoy on the Capitol Beltway on March 07, 2022 in Bethesda, Maryland. Photo: Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images (Getty Images)
It looks like we have finally found common ground between the People’s Convoy and Washington D.C. residents. One unnamed protester took to social media Thursday to complain about all the rude hand gestures flying from drivers sharing the freeway loop with the pointless protest in a classic case of “if you can’t stand the heat, get the heck off the Beltway.”
Zachary Petrizzo has been on top of this story from day one for the Daily Beast, and every day bring new strangeness. Now protesters — champions of free speech and all things liberty — are having a tough time when that American spirit is thrown back at them.
The video was reposted Thursday by Petrizzo as Texas Senator Ted Cruz rode along with truckers to express his support for the photo op — I mean, movement.
“We go around the Beltway, birds are flying. Birds are flying everywhere. That’s the kind of people that live up there,” the unidentified protester said.
Yup. That certainly is the kind of people who live up there, and you came from elsewhere to fuck up their already stressful urban commuter lives, pal. What did you expect people who already deal with horrendous traffic every day were going to do? Join in on a sing-a-long and hug it out? They’re Washingtonians, not Royal Canadian Mounted Police at an illegally blocked international border crossing.
The image of truckers driving aimlessly in a circle and getting their feelings hurt is such a perfect metaphor that if you were to put it in a novel, an editor would strike it as hacky. The protest is supposedly against COVID-19 mandates, but those are mostly disappearing from the U.S. The last state to have a mask mandate, Hawaii, will be lifting those restrictions later this month. Courts have routinely struck down vaccine mandates inside the U.S. Thirteen states actually have bans on various levels of vaccine mandates, according to the National Academy For State Health Policy. Twenty states ban proof-of-vaccine requirements. What mandates do exist usually apply to healthcare workers, which is just common sense as they are interacting with sick patients all day.
The COVID-19 vaccine mandate for international truckers that the protest is nominally organized against are enforced on both sides of the northern border, at least, so unless this driving aimlessly around the Beltway is going to change Canada’s mind (and shutting down their capital for three weeks didn’t even move the needle) the shots are here to stay.
The good people of the D.C. metro area are no strangers to speaking their minds in the streets, like these two residents who had connected over their shared outrage over the trashing of the city on Jan. 6.
